January 4, 1998

By DALE PECK

DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE KIDS
Stories. By Jay Neugeboren.
University of Massachusetts, $24.95.

he range of subjects in these stories, a best-of collection of Jay Neugeboren's work from the past 25 years, is small, offering glimpses into the familiar domestic dramas of our time, and the focus the author brings to them is also small, in tone and style and especially in the scope of its prose. Neugeboren ventures cautiously into a story and never quite goes as far as one might hope. Poised uneasily between the working and educated classes, the world evoked in ''Don't Worry About the Kids'' seems filled with mystery and potential, but the accumulated, slightly mundane details constrict it into a sphere of unrealized possibilities where the epiphanies tend to be too easy or too trite. One character, arriving at an understanding of her mother's emotional reticence, quotes her these lines from ''My Antonia'': ''Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.'' The best the mother can reply is, ''Life was very hard in those days.'' The banality is intentional, pathos presumably its desired effect; but mostly it leaves one yearning for the real thing.